Monday, October 28, 2024

Perfect Day

 

What appears to be a brand new album from one of the great masters of ambient, cosmic, devotional and meditative music has just been made available for streaming on Al Gromer's channel, among other platforms. 

Not only that but having listened through this several times I have to say it's probably one of the best things I've ever heard from him. No kidding! I just can't recommend it highly enough. What a gorgeous experience.   

A balm for the spirit in these troubled times.

Friday, October 18, 2024

Antisocial media

After all, the idea of following and being followed by people is fundamentally cultish, tendentious, and more than a little frightening. 

Friday, October 11, 2024

"Fit the sound and vision to the pattern of his brainwaves..."

In reality, of course, there is no clear difference between a "pitch" and a "rhythm"; both are subspecies of periodic phenomena related to the physical oscillation of air molecules, electric currents, or other media. In practice the distinction is somewhat provisional and is in principal a perceptual or psychoacoustic effect as opposed to a material property.

By definition a transient must spend at least some of its finite period in the "on" part of the cycle, meaning there can be no such thing as an ideal transient (also known as an ideal pulse), which would have zero duration and thus be infinitely thin. Such transients, although conceivable, would likely escape detection by anyone, and are therefore seldom encountered. 

Pitch and rhythm are really just descriptions applied to collections of detectable transients variously interepreted by brains as being components of (re)cognizeable harmonic or rhythmic structures. The rate of oscillation, along with other cues like harmonic content, determines the mode of interpretation, so that a pitch or frequency is equally a very fast rhythm, and a rhythm is also like a kind of extremely low-frequency pitch or melody.

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Blinken lied to Congress about Israel

As we might have expected, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suppressed the findings of two internal reports confirming what was already patently obvious to almost anyone paying attention: Israel deliberately blocked aid shipments to the beleaguered Palestinians trapped in Gaza. Meanwhile, no significant pressure has, to anyone's knowledge, been exerted on the Israeli government to curtail their ongoing genocidal campaign to exterminate the Palestinian population under the pretext of "national security"; apparently Israel's reinvigorated efforts to escalate other conflicts in the Middle East have upstaged their peril. The general consensus being that the wider world, composed as it is of various nations, is in fact significantly less secure than it was at the outset of these machinations, the disconnect between rhetoric and reality on the part of the leaders of the "free world" has scarcely been so stark. 

If the task of defending democratic freedoms must now include, in addition to an illegal 57-year occupation followed by innumerable other breaches of international law during that period, inventing endless excuses for mass murder alongside an unprecedented attack on free speech intended to marginalize, discredit, criminalize and ultimately silence all critics, then like Orwell we must finally conclude that the corruption of language is indeed central to the consolidation and maintenance of the power structure. 

This time, however, we need not imagine the "boot stamping on a human face -- forever." It's here already: it's on every channel, and it wants your campaign donation.